If you run across a severed limb in Savannah, don't freak — it's just art

When body cast artist Ali Waller decided to cast severed limbs and hide them around Savannah for residents to find, she didn't expect the video she posted about the project on TikTok to go viral.

Within hours, someone had found the lifelike hand that, found by anyone not aware of the project, would likely result in a 911 call. But over three million views and five pieces later, Waller has created a unique scavenger hunt experience for locals and tourists to partake in.

"I didn't anticipate the response that we were going to get," Waller said. "The excitement that we've been met with has been really exciting."

It's a project that was conceived by Ali and her sister Emily Waller Singeisen.

Singeisen is an educator who was given a grant by the Society for Classical Studies, a non-profit scholarly organization devoted to advancing knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the ancient Greek and Roman world and its enduring value. The grant, titled Ancient Worlds and Modern Communities, is intended to expand awareness of the classics and new approaches to classic literature.

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"I was really just trying to think of a way to help expose people to new approaches to the classics, to classical literature to classical mythology," Singeisen said. "I really was wanting to do something that was both visual and literary and so I called Ali and we sort of conceived of this project together."

Each piece created by Waller is hidden in different parts of Savannah, Charleston, S.C., and Chattanooga, Tenn., along with books that are new, feminist adaptations of popular myths meant to recast mythic women in new and empowering ways. And Waller's accompanying piece goes beyond a cool and creepy souvenir and aims to bring symbolism to the project.

"Ali's artwork was sort of a way to visually represent what so many of these stories were doing, which was redeeming and reimagining these women in mythology as empowering figures and as whole people, even while their identities are so fragmented by the violence that they're often subjected to," Singeisen explained.

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The latest piece was a severed finger with blood-red nail polish, hidden with the book "Antigone Rising" by Helen Morales. As Singeisen walked through Colonial Park Cemetery, looking for the perfect spot to place it so this piece didn't get snatched up as quickly as the others (it was found the next day), it was hard to tell real from fake as she held the ceramic plate attached to the limb.

Waller has cast over 1,500 people to date, a number that grew after the start of the Jeffrey Epstein sex crime case in a project titled /200. Self-taught, she began body casting in the wake of her own healing from multiple assaults starting at the age of 12 and used the project to cast survivors of sexual assault and hear their stories.

"Displaying a body, in general, is something that people perceive differently," Waller said. "I'm always shocked when people see it as taboo or something like that, because I see it so differently. I think that the use of bodies in art is so unique because it's different to the viewer because it challenges the viewer's relationship with their body. And most of the time, the way that they see this piece has something to do with their own story."

There are only a few more pieces the duo are hiding this month, but Waller said she would like to continue the project as a sort of installation and hopes some of the pieces end up as Christmas gifts.

With the success of the scavenger hunt, Savannah residents may be seeing severed limbs around the city often.

"People love to find things on just a very simple level. I think that it's exhilarating to be going throughout your day and to encounter something unexpected," Singeisen said. "I think in a way the joy and the excitement at discovering that, we're really just trying to bring something to light which is already there. And that to me, is what the hiding things in plain sight kind of thing really represents."

Laura Nwogu is the quality of life reporter for Savannah Morning News. Contact her at LNwogu@gannett.com. Twitter: @lauranwogu_

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Viral TikTok scavenger hunt in Savannah features severed limbs, books